Notes
About Prisma:
It is a place I got locked in one night when I was supposed to leave for my sister’s wedding. I recall feeling a strong touch on both my legs as I was sitting in the college’s library waiting for one of the librarians to come and announce its closure. Yet, no one came, and the touch became tighter and tighter in a way that hardened getting up the wooden seat I was sitting on. My senses were well alarmed as I kept hearing voices of lonely children who seemed to be longing for company.
Yet, the children became monsters when the library locked its doors and there was no one to call since I felt my mouth was sewed. Perhaps, it was a craft done by a witch I have mistaken for a friend, but it was too late to pronounce words of grievance about the odd happening. That haunting experience was the reason for my sleepless nights and mental breakdowns that evolved to the writing of my book The Seed of Love. In my book, I describe a crumbling down mansion that resembled the college I was trapped in by body and intellect.
The horrific thing about that experience is that my thoughts were not connected to a body that all it wanted was to evade the current moment, since it was not the present moment. I was supposed to be in another place of light where joyful songs were sang as a celebration of the arrival of a bride whom I wanted to see in a wedding dress. The white veil she wore was the only color my eyes needed to see waving from afar, where I stood in front of the window waiting for peace to be declared.
The minute became a second, then back to being a lunatic, but with no love to hold on to in that somber night. To lose it for the scene to be completed at the absence of a person who was kept a pray rather than a hostage. The only voices heard were that of the children who kept musing about the tranquility they were having somewhere in the dark corners of the hallways as I walked, too fearful to run by belief that the floor would fall to pieces if any wrong move was made.
The concept of the Book of Rules (B.R) I have mentioned in my book was also inspired from Prisma, where I felt there was a party happening in that empty place where I was an intruder. The most important thing about Prisma that evoked both my fright and interest is that these children were not visible. This feeling evolved to many feelings, and all I wanted to do is write about it. Back then my body was too loose to hold a pen and call upon the order of my intellect to convey the extravagance of the happening into words.
To guess if there is any space for guessing that life has stopped at that moment when only the sound of ghosts was heard. In the flipping of pages, the transparency of the drops of rain, the music of the buried radio, it was all felt at that moment where I sensed the existence of other beings passing by me down the hallway. The creation of the two characters of my book Cozbi & Joey (Joseph) were a persona to myself as I needed not tell the world that I was locked in a haunted place.
It was an experience they helped me convey into words, and to eventually be liberated from its memory. The sense of horror felt was turned into a theme of the book alongside to mystery since I was indeed lost. My book’s genre is a paranormal romance and true to say I was in love with the place and its spooky atmosphere, and it is a feeling conveyed through the love affair between both of my characters.
Until this very day, after my book was published and many readers were “blown away” by it, I still feel like there is truth in the unseen objects. Like they are holding a secret to themselves, and this trait is expressed by ‘the little secret’ the two lovers had back in high school.
When writing other books, I constantly do a reference to Prisma as an indicator of feeling lost within my thoughts. It feels that one day, I will be lost in the allies of that place with only the screams of the children indicating the end of times.
